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International Review on Computers and Software - January 2007 - Papers

Managing the Quality of Small Hospitality Businesses via Semantic Web Services
The Need for a Software Process Improvement Model for the Medical Device Industry
An Approach for an Efficient Software Engineering Course Project
Steganography in Artistic Websites
Representing and Formally Modeling COSA Software Architecture with UML 2.0 Profile
Agent Based Architecture for Parallel and Distributed Complex Information Processing
Development of Information Systems Design Models: An Empirical Investigation of Indian Electronic Industry
Fast, Simple and Memory Efficient Algorithm for Mining Association Rules
Resource Reservation in Advance for QoS Based Mobile Applications
Pedagogical Scenarios in SACA: a Collaborative Learning System

International Review on Computers and Software - Papers

Managing the Quality of Small Hospitality Businesses via Semantic Web Services
by D. Kanellopoulos, S. Kotsiantis

Abstract - Small hospitality businesses are vital to the economic health of both developed and developing countries. Although small hospitality businesses have a crucial role in creating tourist satisfaction, they are neither a uniform group, nor able to give consistently high service quality. In the hospitality sector, excellence is synonymous to the quality of provided hospitality services. In this paper, we propose a novel web management system that informs its users about qualities of small hospitality businesses that belong to a consortium. The key-idea of the proposed web service oriented architecture is that the web services of participating members (e.g., small hospitality businesses) share their qualities and related resources, resulting to the overall system capacity increase. Mechanisms and techniques are presented concerning: (a) an “information desk” which provides an adaptive search user interface for quality of hospitality business, (b) discovery functions based on semantic representation of the qualities, (c) mining into qualities of hospitality business based on their semantic representation, (d) dynamic ranking of retrieved content list, (e) consumption mechanisms for the local Web Services, (g) e-payment and (h) universal usability access. This analysis can be exploited in the practice of a new hospitality management policy.

Keywords: Semantic web; web services; hospitality business intelligence; excellence.

The Need for a Software Process Improvement Model for the Medical Device Industry

by F. Mc Caffery, G. Coleman

Abstract - Software is becoming an increasingly important aspect of medical devices and medical device regulation. Software enables highly complex systems to be built. However, complexity is the enemy of safety, therefore strict adherence to well documented processes is important within the domain of medical device software. Medical devices can only be marketed if compliance and approval from the appropriate regulatory bodies (e.g. the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)) is achieved. This paper outlines the development of a software process improvement (SPI) model specifically for the medical device industry. The paper details how medical device regulations may be satisfied by adopting relevant practices from the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI^®).

Keywords: Medical device, Software Process Improvement Model, CMMI^®.

An Approach for an Efficient Software Engineering Course Project
by Z. A. Alzamil

Abstract - The course project is a major part of the software engineering course. Instructors are required to train their students on the professional skills to be ready for the real world businesses, which require the students to work on real projects. However, because of the low quality of the students' work, not all of the professional organizations are cooperating to offer the chance for the software engineering students to work on real projects. Therefore, most of the software engineering courses' projects are in-class project, in which the instructors represent the clients. In this paper, I propose an approach that contributes to solving this problem. This approach is based on my experience in involving the software engineering students in real world projects. The proposed approach suggests that, the instructor should take advantage of the local community centers' needs by assigning the students to work on projects that provide these local centers with systematic solution to their systems' needs. This approach has been measured based on a study of the students' perceptions of involving them with the analysis, design, and development of real software systems that are needed by the local community centers. The results of this study have shown that, this approach enables the students to work on real projects and deal with real clients. Also, this approach helps the students to gain professional skills as well as inspiring them with the ethics that are necessary for the software engineers. In addition, this approach showed the students that they can apply the software engineering principles on the real world software systems. Although this approach provides solution to some challenges of the software engineering education, it faces some obstacles, specifically, the project's size and the technical writing skills. The software engineering instructors should select a course project that is small enough to be completed on one academic semester, and provide their students with a standard guide for the technical writing.

Keywords: Software Engineering Education, Course Project.

Steganography in Artistic Websites
by M. Shirali-Shahreza

Abstract - In line with the expansion of the Internet, the issue of information security has gained special importance. Many methods have been provided in order to establish hidden communications. In the meanwhile, steganography is one of a relatively new method. This paper introduces a new method for exchanging information by steganography on artistic websites. The main idea in this method is to hide data by changing the color of artistic websites items like tables, hyperlinks and texts. The suggested method is implemented by using the Java language.

Keywords: HTML (HyperText Markup Language), Information Hiding, Internet Security, Artistic Websites, Steganography.

Representing and Formally Modeling COSA Software Architecture with UML 2.0 Profile

by A. Alti, T. Khammaci, A. Smeda

Abstract - A key aspect of the design of any software system is its architecture. An architecture description provides a formal model of the architecture in terms of components and connectors and how they are composed together. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is widely used in the design of software systems and has recently been extended to better support software architecture description. This paper presents the UML 2.0 Profile for representing and formally modeling software architectures. It describes a UML profile for the model COSA (Component-Object based Software Architecture), which is a software architecture model that describes systems as a collection of components and connectors. It briefly presents COSA and its UML 2.0 Profile, then it illustrates through an example how the Profile can be used to describe the architecture of software systems.

Keywords: Software Architecture, COSA, Architecture Description Languages, UML 2.0 Modeling Language, UML Profile, Mapping.

Agent Based Architecture for Parallel and Distributed Complex Information Processing

by M. Khemakhem, A. Belghith

Abstract - Information processing is a rather multidisciplinary field of research involving various communities resulting in a wealth of applications and solutions. Many effective solutions have been proposed to solve several specific problems. Fortunately, these solutions are generally complementary and can cooperate together in order to solve more complex problems or to improve some specific solutions. Consequently, we propose in this paper a flexible open architecture able to integrate complementary solutions according to the simple rule of plug and play. The proposed architecture is based on agent technology which provides especially autonomy and intelligence. Such aspects generate important added values in building open architectures. The proposed architecture has the great advantage to offer to users a flexible infrastructure where they can easily govern the response time of their own applications to be processed. This flexibility is due to the polyvalence of the corresponding agents. An analytical study has been made to ascertain and evaluate the key performance parameters of this proposed architecture. Conducted experiments show first that this architecture is indeed an efficient framework to support the integration of complementary solutions. Second, we found that the number of agents to be used, the achievable speedup and efficiency factors depends mainly on the task granularity which can be easily governed by users and the capacity of the underlying network. Finally, we found that even a loosely coupled architecture such as a LAN or a grid computing can support effectively the proposed approach.

Keywords: agent technology, open architecture, parallel and distributed complex information processing, solutions integration, performance evaluation.

Development of Information Systems Design Models: An Empirical Investigation of Indian Electronic Industry

by A. Kalia, D. P. Goyal

Abstract - The system design phase plays an important role in the development of Information Systems (ISs). The success of an information system largely depends on this phase. Stepwise Refinement; Level of Abstraction; Structured Design; Integrated Top-down Design and Jackson Structured Programming are some of the most commonly used system design models. Also the developers use various design tools like 'Top-down'; 'Bottom-up'; 'Modular'; 'HIPO/IPO chart'; 'Structured Walk Through'; 'Object Oriented Approach' and 'CASE Tools'. In order to know and analyze the IS design models so as to suggest the best practices and their applications for the successful design of the information systems, the researchers have undertaken a study in some of the large organization in India. The data was collected through interview-cum-questionnaire method from the developers of ISs in Electronic Industry in India. In all 49 developers participated in the study from public, private and joint sector organizations. The data analysis was done by using various statistical tools like average scores, test of significance (t-test) critical ratio etc. On the basis of the findings, several suggestions and recommendations have been made so as to help developers systematically select appropriate models and tools. It is expected that the recommendations made will go a long way in improving the information systems design, which in turn will improve the efficiency of the systems in general and in the Indian electronics industry in particular.

Keywords: Design Methods, Design Tools, Efficiency, Information System Development.

Fast, Simple and Memory Efficient Algorithm for Mining Association Rules

by M. H. Marghny, A. A. Shakour

Abstract - One of the important problems in data mining is discovering association rules from databases of transactions where each transaction consists of a set of items. The most time consuming operation in this discovery process is the computation of the frequency of the occurrences of interesting subset of items (called candidates) in the database of transactions. In this paper, we introduce algorithms that overcome major drawbacks of previous work. First, for small-scale database, both the processing time has been improved significantly. Second, for large-scale database, the proposed algorithms can deal with a database that is substantially larger than the size of available memory. The contributions made in this paper are particularly important because the rate of increase in database size and response time requirements has out-paced advancements in processor and mass storage technology.

Keywords: Data Mining, Association Rules, Time Consuming, Memory Requirements.

Resource Reservation in Advance for QoS Based Mobile Applications
by I. Miloucheva, D. Hetzer, R. Pascotto, K. Jonas

Abstract - Resource reservation in advance in mobile Internet can be used to provide enhanced QoS guarantee for specific applications and better resource utilization of the network infrastructure. Currently, for fixed Internet, resource reservation in advance was proposed for different kind of applications (Grid, content, video and streaming on-demand). The trend for convergence of fixed and mobile Internet services requires also technologies supporting resource reservations in advance of QoS-aware mobile applications in heterogeneous Internet environment. This includes interfaces for users and network administrators to specify advance resource reservation requests for applications of mobile users, negotiation of advance resource reservation for mobile applications and proactive mobility support according QoS/SLA agreements, algorithms for planning and optimization of resource allocations in advance considering the specific of mobile services. This paper summarises the state-of-the-art of resource reservation in advance for fixed and mobile applications. Components and services for advance resource reservation in Mobile Internet are discussed. Example scenario for advance reservation is described based on enhancement of the QoS management architecture for heterogeneous mobile IPv6 networks developed in European IST project DAIDALOS.

Keywords: resource reservation in advance, mobile Internet, QoS based mobile application, mobile RSVP.

Pedagogical Scenarios in SACA: a Collaborative Learning System
by Y. Lafifi, T. Bensebaa

Abstract - SACA is a collaborative learning system based on agent model in which learners collaborate to learn the concepts’ knowledge of the subject to be taught and to resolve the assessment exercises. The aim of this paper is to present the different scenarios for using SACA. These scenarios concern the various tasks which the system provides to its learners: learning, assessment and collaboration between them. Each function is dedicated to an artificial agent composing SACA. Agents’ role will be presented in order to know more about the interactions carried out. This paper shows results of the experiment done at Guelma University.

Keywords: Intelligent agent, Collaborative learning, CSCL, Interaction, Collaboration.